Welcome, we live on a small homestead in the Midwest surrounded by cattle and prairie. We are striving to live a modern, simple lifestyle learning to be as sustainable as possible. This requires hard work, dedication, and a huge learning curve! Join us on our journey as we remodel our home, grow our gardens, preserve food, care for animals, learn new skills and help others by sharing our discoveries and adventures we have along the way.

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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

At Long Last

This weekend we received the keys to our new home. We agreed to purchase the home this fall, made the purchase before Christmas, and finally received the keys this weekend. It was a long process, but we have been waiting even longer to find a home that was right for us, so it was worth the wait.

Like the home we live in now was when we first received the keys, the new house is a fixer upper and we started the evening we received the keys. We would prefer to do the work ourselves though time consuming, expensive, and exhausting than to pay for someone else to fix up a home and not enjoy the quality of work or the finish choices but the cost of these would be passed to the buyer. Instead we would prefer to do the work ourselves and know that the work is good quality and live with choices we like for finishing details. Like this house at first, there were many things we didn't like once we started removing the layers of wall coverings that we will have to deal with. More brainstorming needs to be done and adjustments to our original plans but our journey has began. Like all journeys the path you take has twists and turns but you just keep walking forward and try to enjoy the view as you go, you will only pass over where you are once so you might as make the most of where you are, you will never again return to this point in your journey so enjoy the view.

Yesterday, our path led us to the "new" house and instead of working we spent a short while exploring in the bitter freezing cold along a small pond and our own tiny piece of woods at the end of our property. We had fun following the trail of the neighbors dog for a while, the tracks of a rabbit, and the faint tracks of the birds in the cold winter snow. We walked through the trees from one side of the property to the other and had a blast. When we finished we walked to the house and made dinner in our make shift kitchen listening to music and enjoying the warmth of the house. We didn't get any work done but we made memories and enjoyed time together which is more important than any work on the ever growing "to do" list.

Below are some winter berries that we discovered while on our walk. They looked beautiful against the fresh white of the snow.